Microsoft Azure Stack is an extension of Azure—bringing the agility and innovation of cloud computing to your on-premises environment and enabling the only hybrid cloud that allows you to build and deploy hybrid applications anywhere. We bring together the best of the edge and cloud to deliver Azure services anywhere in your environment.

Project Bletchley: Blockchain infrastructure updates

We said we would “release early and release often” and we are following just that approach. We expand on our blockchain infrastructural work to further improve the services, tools, and best practices needed to design, build out, and manage complex consortium networks and develop business applications with smart contracts.

We released an update to the Azure QuickStart Template to further simplify deployment, improve configurability, and support requested functionality for your consortium Ethereum network. Some of the main updates include:

Support for a smaller network footprint: You can spin up a network as small as three nodes, using fewer Azure resources in your free trial subscription. We have reduced the number of public IP addresses required to one.

Resilience to reboots: The nodes within the network can withstand planned or unplanned reboots of the virtual machine. They re-establish the network connections on startup automatically.

Enabled diagnostics: Diagnostics are turned on for each virtual machine in the network.

Simpler user input: You no longer need to generate and provide a private key. The key is automatically generated from your provided passphrase, further simplifying the prerequisites.

Additional refactoring and optimizations: We made changes to enable easy user customization of the underlying ARM templates and scripts and to improve the overall experience, such as speeding up the admin page refresh.

For additional information, visit the detailed walkthrough of the template.

Do not hesitate to leave a comment or send me an email with questions, feedback, or additional requests as you begin. We genuinely value your feedback.